The latest social engineering attempt by virus writers appears to be pornography. Another Visual Basic virus, discovered Tuesday and called W32/Naked@MM, lures potential victims with the subject line "Naked Wife." The message body reads: "My wife never look like that! ;-)". It carries an attachment, NakedWife.exe.

People clicking on the forbidden fruit and hoping to watch a Flash movie will instead end up sending the virus to all E-mail entries in their Windows address books. The virus then tries to delete all .bmp, .com, .dll, .exe, .ini, and .log files in the Windows and Windows\System directories.

Patrick Nolan, a virus researcher with McAfee's avert Research Center says that so far, about 18 companies--including some Fortune 500 firms--have reported infections. "This virus has a destructive payload," Nolan says.

He says he's unsure whether this virus will spread like other recent Visual Basic viruses such as the Love Bug. "It's been about an average virus as far as the number of infections reported to us today," he says. One of the virus' mitigating factors is that it requires Visual Basic 6 or higher runtime files. Most major antivirus software can detect it, including McAfee, Sophos, and Symantec.